Asheville Anniversary

So a friend emailed me the other day asking me for a link to my blog that she hadn't read in some time. Having not read it myself in probably longer, I headed over here and discovered that, to my shame, the last time I wrote about my new life in Asheville was, um, Memorial Day. To put this in perspective, we are now on the cusp of Labor Day. Nothing like a good, long summer vacation.

I have, I hasten to plug -- um, mention -- been writing plenty of a slightly different sort at YogaMamaMe. I didn't mean to abandon A Hill-ish Life. I just figured if ever I had a good story that couldn't be tied to motherhood and aging and yoga and my wavering sense of self I'd traipse back over here to tell it.

It seems, however, that if you try hard enough, just about anything in life can be tied to motherhood and aging and yoga and my wavering sense of self. Especially if you have a toddler, have just turned 42, and are struggling to keep up with your yoga practice when you have limited time, your favorite new yoga teacher is about to leave town, and your energy level hovers -- for obvious reasons -- around that of a 42-year-old pregnant woman. In other words, I suddenly and unintentionally was no longer writing pieces for A Hill-ish Life.

But a story did come up a couple of weeks ago, one that exemplified yet again the lovely mingling of small town and home of urban transplants, hills living and tourist center, place that's still new to me and, yes, home, that Asheville has come to mean. Best yet, the story takes place on my and Hubby's wedding anniversary. Which itself took place just a couple of weeks before the anniversary of our first year in Asheville. Which, come to think of it, is right about, oh, today.

So now, it seems, it is time to give some attention to A Hill-ish Life, if only as practice for remembering to give The Boy an occasional pat on the head after his sibling arrives in March. (It is very difficult for me to even joke about this, so please know that I am joking.)

Being the type of person who gets grumpy when you ask me to plan something special for myself but who secretly expects the person doing the asking to make the day special despite my protests that it doesn't matter, I didn't really get on the ball in terms of planning a special wedding anniversary. We had just ended a long run of visitors, with my dearest friend flying back to L.A. two days before our anniversary. I had work to do, a toddler to run after, and did I mention the pregnant thing? We weren't public yet, which meant I had to pretend not to be tired and sick and not unlike Tony Soprano wandering through one of his dreams that none of the viewers ever really understood -- kind of disconnected and confused and only pretending to get what was going on.

But, busy as we both were, Hubby rightly insisted we mark the occasion with a nice lunch. And I found myself waiting for him in the sunshine on the steps leading to the street near the restaurant in a cute red silk top and high heels. Neither high heels nor silk is a favorite of mothers of toddlers: High heels for obvious reasons -- you try kneeling down to pick up a 25-pound sack of child in three-inch strappy sandals. Silk because it can not be worn anywhere in the vicinity of a 20-month-old when food, dirt, or grape juice are to be found nearby. Which, where a toddler is concerned, is always. So you know I had finally managed to mark this as a special occasion. I had also cleverly hiked up a too-long black skirt into a sexy little number that worked as long as you didn't get close enough to spot the spider veins that have been stealthily creeping across my legs since I last wore shorts in 2005 -- and no one was going to get that close besides my husband, who probably knows about them already and has so far managed to avoid mentioning them to me and probably could be counted on to ignore them on our wedding anniversary.

We were meeting at a lovely restaurant we had discovered a couple weeks before, during my mother-in-law's visit (second in the string of three out-of-town groups who ranged through our home in July and August). Cucina 24 is everything the hills of Western Carolina are not to those who have never been here. They cook Italian, not possum. They have a professional pizza oven, not a wood-burning stove, which would be far easier to find in this town. Everything we have ever eaten there has been impeccable, so much so that I am not joking when I say I am looking forward to bringing my parents there on their next trip to Asheville. I am not joking about this because my mother does not joke about the places she is expected to sleep and eat when on vacation. Generally, this list should not include anyplace in Asheville, but as she has been forced here by my relocation of her grandson, she has discovered both a hotel and a restaurant or two up to her standards, and I felt certain she would welcome Cucina 24 into the fold as well.

Hubby hurried down the steps to meet me carrying a bundle of roses -- four red ones for each year of our marriage, and one white one for The Boy. It was an utterly unironic romantic gesture, the kind men get to make on wedding anniversaries without fear of appearing sentimental and like they are expected to mark other occasions -- like our first cup of coffee together or the first time my basset hound Roxanne presented her belly to him for rubbing -- with equally romantic gestures.

We settled down for a lovely extended meal. We shared a salad. We ordered entrees. We chatted with the waiter. We forgot that Thursdays are pretty much always hellish for him at work and I hadn't made any money in weeks.

As we nibbled at our gelato, my rings sparkling wittily under the recessed lights, feeling every bit the couple on their four-year-wedding-anniversary date, the waiter brought us the check.

"You'll see," he said somewhat apologetically, "that only the dessert is on there. Table Restaurant is picking up the rest."

It was one of those moments when -- again, I'm going back to a Tony Soprano dream even though that show is way past its cultural currency, but I can't think of any better analogy -- you know the person speaking is indeed speaking English, but you can't for the life of you understand what he's saying.

"What?" Hubby said, a reasonable and impressive response.

"Table is picking it up," the waiter explained again. "That's all I know." He reminded us that he was new at the job, as we'd discussed during the course of our leisurely and -- did I mention? -- not inexpensive lunch.

Table is another restaurant in town that proves yet again how Asheville really isn't located anywhere near Appalachia but rather on a tesseract that sweeps you to a hidden spot in Oregon where everyone has North Carolina plates and pays North Carolina taxes and doesn't vote for John Edwards but doesn't really live in North Carolina. We're not quite in California, but we are most definitely located on the west coast, no matter what any map or airplane pilot might tell you.

The waiter retreated and Hubby and I began spinning our conspiracy theories.

"Do you think someone mistook us for someone else?" I asked uneasily.

Hubby shook his head. He is a man and does not like other people to pay for his meals. Something about the mysterious connection between a wallet, a stomach, and a penis that I've never been able to figure out. Not that I've really tried. If someone else wants to pay for my meal badly enough to fight me about it, the pacifist in me graciously gives way every time.

Then I had a thought. "I saw a guy sitting alone at the counter," I said, my mind tripping spy-like around the clues. "The manager was pouring him glasses of wine out of a bottle and seemed to know him. You think it was the owner of Table?"

"Even if that was the owner of Table, why would he buy us lunch?" Hubby asked. He squirmed the squirm of a man who has had someone else beat him to the check -- only he didn't even know who this someone was or that there had been a race.

We stared at each other. We had switched genres mid-story, a romance novel suddenly taking a turn into a mystery thriller.

"I hope he didn't hear me say this place is as good as Table," Hubby finally ventured, squirming even more. I had to agree that it's one thing to have a stranger buy you lunch and quite another thing for him to do it because you have just maligned his livelihood.

"He couldn't have," I said, sounding about as sure as I felt.

"Do you think it's the faculty adviser thing?" Hubby asked uncertainly. He had just begun a new part-time job as the faculty adviser to the student newspaper at a small college just outside of town. The owners of Table, he had informed me over lunch, were graduates of that school.

"Maybe," I said dubiously. "But it seems strange for them to buy you lunch just because you're advising the newspaper."

Hubby agreed. But what other reason could there be?

"Do you think it was the wine?" I finally asked. I barely remembered the wine, since it had been spilled on me -- more appropriately, all over me -- over two months before, when my sister and her boyfriend were in town. We'd taken them to dinner at Table -- then, in our pre-Cucina 24 days, our favorite restaurant in Asheville (and it's still our second, in case the owner is reading this). Unbeknownst to me, the people at the next table ordered red wine from a waiter who was wearing tight new shoes or had had one too many the night before or otherwise was having one of those nights when you should not be balancing trays containing glasses of red wine. It tumbled and got me. Pretty well.

Apologies were sincere and many, the wine didn't seem about to do anything permanent to my outfit, and I frankly didn't think it was a huge deal. Apologies accepted, we headed into dessert.

But Asheville isn't a hillbilly town, and Table is the sort of restaurant that could easily make it in L.A. or San Francisco (maybe not Manhattan because it is, after all, Asheville, and a little laid back for Manhattanites). So when the check arrived I expressed some surprise that they hadn't, say, comped us a dessert, just as a formal apology for the wine.

Can I explain here that I am not cheap and I am not a freeloader -- my expectations of free desserts and receipt of free lunches notwithstanding? It wasn't the six dollars for a dessert, just the expectation that in a nice restaurant that's what you do to apologize for spilling wine on a customer.

While I intended my comment as nothing more than an end-of-meal conversation piece, Hubby took it a bit more seriously. Maybe it's that he had taken out his wallet and therefore involved his penis in the conversation. On our way out, he noted to the manager -- not angrily or rudely, but forcefully -- that in the future if they spilled wine on a customer they might consider comping the dessert.

The manager was most gracious and promised to do just that the next time we were in.

Only he wasn't there the next few times we were. And he wasn't the manager, apparently. He was the owner. Who happened to be having lunch at Cucina 24 on our wedding anniversary. And who happened to recognize us -- well, probably not me because I'm not 6'5" like Hubby -- and ended up comping us everything but dessert.

Figuring out the mystery brought on an odd mixture of responses. I mostly felt pleased with myself for figuring it out, which just shows how self-centered I can be sometimes. But I also was genuinely touched by the gesture, and impressed by his ability to recall us, recall the two-month-old minor incident, and respond so graciously.

Hubby was touched too, but, much more, sort of embarrassed. Like I said, it's hard for men to let someone else buy them a meal, especially when that person doesn't even know them, wasn't eating with them, and certainly wasn't party to the anniversary being celebrated.

But the anniversary was, in a way, the whole point. Not just the wedding anniversary part, but its proximity to the anniversary of our first year in Asheville.

After all, here we were, celebrating our life together as that life settled into the rhythms of a new home, where the food is as good as anything we could have found in L.A. but the people are, at times like this, in the best way of a small town, often better.